Kausfiles

Luckily, in the future there will be no irony: “There is no walk of life that is not going to require computational understanding,” says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, describing his notion of a future oriented around Artificial Intelligence. But he’s optimistic!

“The most exciting thing to me is beyond what we are doing ourselves, which is to take the same AI capability we have and make it available so everybody can use it,” he says. Take the state I was born in [Andhra Pradesh] and the state I live in [Washington]. Both are using essentially the same machine-learning algorithms to make high school dropout predictions.” [E.A.]

Exciting! But is the algorithm sophisticated enough to realize that, since pretty clearly there’s no role for non-smart people in Nadella’s vision of the future, high school students in both countries may be saying “F*ck it, might as well drop out now”?